Every once in a while, people ask us "Will the Mono project
implement WPF/XAML?" or "What is your position on Apollo?".

Some suggest that we must have a one-to-one implementation
available in Mono. Some others believe that we should
implement a new GUI toolkit and plot our own destiny.

Some argue that to win the hearts and minds of the Linux
community we should appeal, not only to the desktop users, but
also to other members of the community: system administrators,
designers, musicians, perl programmers and users of Midnight
Commander.

There has been a lot of debate over Flash, Adobe's Atlas
and WPF/E and how these technologies might be the future of
application development.

For the past few months we have heard you loud and clear.
And we have been working on a technology that we believe will
revolutionize user interfaces.

Today we are announcing the response to Microsoft's
WPF/XAML, a response to Flash and WPF/E. A cross-platform GUI
toolkit (supports Windows, MacOS and Linux and is easily
ported to new platforms) written entirely in managed code and
100% open source. It is completely licensed under the MIT X11
license terms as well, for your freedom-zero needs.

We have been developing this under secrecy until we had
something worth showing to the world. It builds on years of
building user interfaces, toolkits and frameworks.

This is a preview release, currently the major sample
application is a BitTorrent client built using Alan
McGovern and Gregor Burger's MonoTorrent
library (Alan and Gregor wrote this library as part of
Google's Summer of Code 2007).

You can download a tarball from here,
browse the source code here.
To build the software, you will need to also download monotorrent
and edit the Makefiles accordingly.

The BitSharp GUI is something that I quickly put together
this weekend, so it might need some extra polish, feel free to
send your MIT X11 contributions my way.